Ethics: The Impact on Engineers

Learn about situations that might lead to ethical and legal issues and how to apply ethics, law, and sound judgment to decision making.

Engineering work involves high levels of responsibility with satisfaction, profit, and can offer advancement from successful projects that meet needs of people and nature. However, engineering work also involves ethical and legal dilemmas that can cause loss of jobs, business, money, reputations, and licenses to practice. It can involve lawsuits, investigations, or official inquiries and, in extreme cases, indictments, trials, and convictions based on civil or criminal law. Most engineers do not experience such situations, but avoiding them requires knowledge, experience, and judgement. The maze of ethical and legal norms and rules arising in situations can be confusing, but engineers can be equipped with basic knowledge through a framework of situations, rules, and guidelines that will enable them to avoid mistakes and provide guidance to other stakeholders in the arenas where engineers practice. These involve a hierarchy from things that you must do to achieve compliance to those that you should do in areas of choice based on codes of ethics and situations where practitioners have discretion. Situations range from planning through implementation and regulation, and include activities of multiple players.

Faculty

Neil S. Grigg

Colorado State University